Down but not out, Québec solidaire must repurpose its role

 

QS parliamentary leader Ruba Ghazal, of Palestinian origin, hoists a keffiyeh at the swearing-in of the party’s MNAs at Quebec's National Assembly.

Introduction

For a comprehensive account of the issues, outcomes and shifting political trends and alignments revealed in Quebec’s October 5 general election, I recommend this article: A dangerous liaison looms in Québec – Canadian Dimension. The authors, Andrea Levy and André Frappier, are active members of Québec solidaire, the party formed in 2006 by veterans of previous left-wing formations, feminists, environmentalists, independentists and international solidarity activists. As they note,

“QS stood out markedly from the four other parties in its robust defence of public services, call to raise the minimum wage, opposition to privatization, and plea for progressive taxation. And indeed, since the election, it has doubled down on its pledge to serve as a bulwark against austerity. On other issues, however, its commitments were patently unequal to the challenges of the current moment….

“Overall, Québec Solidaire waged a respectable campaign for a party that remains social democratic in its orientation. However, its discourse reflected a gradual shift to the centre that has occurred particularly in the last nine years, spearheaded by former party co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau Dubois (GND). Once a firebrand student leader, GND reversed course as the head of QS, appealing for pragmatism and positioning QS as a ‘party of government’ (he has since resigned and retired from politics for the time being). This exacerbated the internal tensions between the forces within the party seeking ‘legitimacy’ and a foothold in Québec’s political class and the party’s left-wing members, who insisted that QS should live up to its slogan of being “un parti de la rue et des urnes” (a party of the streets and the ballot box)—that is, a democratic party whose political orientations are rooted in the social movements working for fundamental social change. Some of these party members came together to form what was initially an informal internal dissident sub-group calling itself the Parti de la rue, which has lately evolved into a more formal organization operating within and outside QS.”

 Translated below are two articles by members of the Parti de la rue critically analyzing the challenges ahead for Quebec working people and Québec solidaire in light of the election result. They were published in the left-wing online journal Presse-toi à gauche, which supports QS while urging it to turn left around an anticapitalist program of radical social change.

 The evolution of Quebec election results over the last decade is illustrated in the table I have composed and published at the conclusion of this blog post, below. The figures for party votes and seats won in 2026 have been corrected according to recounts in some electoral districts, as reported by Quebec’s chief electoral officer.

Richard Fidler

* * *

What are the prospects, given the rise of the right? What role can Québec solidaire play in this context?

 By André Frappier and Bernard Rioux

With the PQ’s accession to government, we are entering a political period that risks accentuating the rise of the conservative right in Quebec if we fail to provide a clear and radical response

Highlights

The election campaign ends with an unprecedented distortion of the vote. The PQ came to power with only 28.02% of the vote and won 59 seats, forming a minority government. The Liberal Party won 40 seats with 24.23%, the Conservative Party 19 with 20.66% and Québec solidaire 9 with 12.42%. The CAQ did not win any seats with 13.35%.

Given the anti-immigration policies of the PQ’s Paul St-Pierre Plamondon (PSPP, as the PQ leader is often named) as well as its conservative policies (increase in the military budget and armaments, etc.), it will find support among Éric Duhaime’s Conservatives, who will thus strengthen their positions.

The role of the trade union and popular movement and of all social movements

The labour and grassroots movements have been special targets of the Legault government’s attacks. Anti-union laws have been adopted in quick succession. Insufficient investment in both the health and education sectors has led to a significant deterioration of hospital and school infrastructure. Privatization policies in the health sector have reduced access to care. This government’s denial of the housing crisis has been the terrain on which homelessness has developed. The promises made by all political parties during the election campaign, with the exception of Québec solidaire, to reduce the size of the state, indicate that austerity policies will continue to prevail. The PQ’s minority government will be pressured by the Conservative Party of Quebec to continue to deepen these policies. To believe, in this context, that the PQ government will be open to proposals from unions, grassroots groups and civil society as a whole appears more and more to be a denial of reality.

And the attacks will not only come from the Quebec government. Already, the Carney government’s major projects in terms of fossil fuels, the militarization of the economy and the implementation of artificial intelligence in as many companies as possible entail reducing the rights of the labour movement, as the federal government’s Bill 39 illustrates, as well as denying the rights of First Nations.

Our agenda must focus on building a broad front of resistance.

Sovereignty and the trap of calling for unity for a referendum

Sovereignty will be a key issue in the next period, for several reasons. First, because it is the framework in which the project of social change in Quebec will be defined. Secondly, because it is also the main component of the strategy for social change in the Canadian state. Thirdly, because it will be the objective of the traps launched by the PQ against QS.

The text published in Le Devoir, “For the construction of a progressive independentist alliance,” already indicates the trap in which we must not fall and the challenge of the political campaign to be built. In this article, the authors, including the former president of the CSN, Jacques Létourneau, call for an alliance between the Parti Québécois and Québec solidaire to achieve independence. They invite Québec solidaire to exit the debate on secularism and to reconsider its position on immigration, a debate they term ideological.

Québec solidaire must not fall into this trap, which would serve to normalize and endorse the PQ’s retrograde policies. QS would suffer the same fate as Jagmeet Singh’s NDP, which condoned the policies of the Liberal Party, and would lose all credibility with the population looking for an inclusive, feminist and anti-globalization alternative.

Accordingly, QS must more than ever assume its role as an anti-capitalist left-wing party

We must give meaning to the struggle for independence, which is linked as well to the emancipation of the Indigenous peoples and is also addressed to the question of our relationship with progressives, trade unionists and feminists in the Rest of Canada. The Canadian state in its present form must be defined as the shared fetter on the working class of English Canada and Quebec, and on the Indigenous peoples.

The rise of the far right under the Trump administration in the United States has many progressives fearing that independence would isolate and weaken Quebec and put it in danger. They believe that, in this context, independence must be postponed.

The position put forward by the QS leadership during the election campaign was not convincing in this regard. We talk about the constituent assembly as the democratic way to achieve independence, but we don’t see it as a class struggle where we have to work with allies, first and foremost our trade unionist and feminist comrades in the Rest of Canada. We must not forget, as well, the PQ’s failures with regard to the repatriation of powers.

Canada today is a state dominated by a powerful imperialist bourgeoisie. Canadian banks and companies invested $1,288,860 billion in assets abroad in 2018. The national struggle in Quebec cannot, in this context, be conceived as the repatriation of powers. The logic of that conception would be the reproduction of the same infrastructural pattern as that of Canadian capitalism, but under Quebec control. In a way, this was the experience of Québec Inc. But in the end, the rules of the globalized economy got the better of Rona, Saint-Hubert, Cirque du Soleil and Bombardier’s C Series, which became foreign assets.

The successive austerity policies of the PQ have contributed to amputating the PQ’s sovereigntist project of its dimension as a social project in favour of the popular majority. Let us remember the cuts in health care, with the elimination of 12,000 nursing positions in 1996.[1]Today, the PQ of PSPP is going even further with its infamous promises to “deburocratize” the state and to reduce immigration to Quebec under its leadership.

Québec solidaire must fight for an independence that promises popular sovereignty throughout

The economic, fossil-fuel and environmental crisis will deepen the offensive of the various governments and the intransigence of the bosses. These tensions will fuel the far right, which is seeking to channel popular anger to its advantage. It will be impossible to counter this situation if there is no left-wing alternative. If QS does not situate the struggle for sovereignty within the anti-imperialist framework, if it does not situate the environmental struggle within an internationalist framework, it will necessarily be limited to fighting for reforms in Quebec, within the framework of Canadian federalism, a path that others have trodden before it. This situation would only leave the door open to a nationalist politics which, as we have seen in the last period, has led to an identitarian nationalism. And this is what the Parti québécois proposes in its Blue Book. What this document shows is not a break with the North American imperial order, but its reconfiguration: the transition from a Canadian federalism to a formal sovereignty that reclothes the same relations of economic dependency, the same Western military alignments, the same structures of class and gender domination and the same depridation of nature.

To think of a uniquely Québécois strategy for social change is to ignore the power of financial institutions and corporations. Let us remember the fate that the European Central Bank reserved for Greece (which is nevertheless a sovereign state).

Québec solidaire must defend an independence that is based on popular sovereignty and is a true national liberation. It presupposes a break with the circuits of financial dependency that bind Quebec to Wall Street and Bay Street; the collective appropriation of financial institutions rather than their simple repatriation for the benefit of a national bourgeoisie; disarmament rather than the race for military spending in the order of 5% of GDP; the full and complete recognition of the sovereignty of Indigenous nations over their territories rather than the unilateral codification of borders; and a reorganization of the economy around care and ecological limits rather than around the stability of markets.

October 20, 2026

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What are the post-election prospects for Québec solidaire?

 By Roger Rashi

The Quebec election of October 5 gave us some very unusual results, thanks to the current fragmentation of the political field and the archaic voting system that elects the “first-past-the-post” candidate with the highest plurality.

With only 28 per cent of the vote, the Parti Québécois won 59 seats and will form a minority government. This is an ambivalent result: last December, opinion polls gave the party 39% of the vote and a probable majority of seats. Its shift to the right and its anti-immigration rhetoric have helped make the PQ “the most badly elected government in history” in Quebec. The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), the party in power from 2018 to 2026, is the big loser in this election: it is completely wiped off the map, losing all 90 seats won in 2022 while retaining 13.35% of the total vote. The Quebec Liberal Party, with a modest 24 per cent, won 40 seats and will form the official opposition. The big winner was undoubtedly the Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ), a hard-right party, which entered the National Assembly for the first time with 19 MNAs and 20.6% of the vote. As for Québec solidaire, it avoided the rout that so many observers predicted, retaining 9 of its 11 seats and winning 12.43% of the vote.

Becoming the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary bulwark against austerity

The only left-wing party in the National Assembly — the other three embracing, to varying degrees, right-wing programs and austerity policies — QS claims to be the sole representative of popular interests in Parliament and the bulwark against austerity. How will it play its cards in a minority Parliament where it could hold the balance of power, just like the PCQ for that matter.

Already, some are advising QS to make an “independentist and progressive alliance” with the PQ in power. Others believe that it should turn even further towards the centre to increase its support and avoid the decline it faces. However, these are precisely the orientations that QS must avoid by all means; they are the result of a poor analysis of the situation and could definitively ruin it.

The PQ is no longer a partially social democratic party or even a vaguely progressive party. Under its current leader, its trajectory is clearly moving to the right, and it has adopted a program that is openly pro-austerity (reduction in the size of the government, cuts in the public service, return to a balanced budget within two years) and fiercely anti-immigration, which will inevitably lead it to form an alliance on these issues with the PCQ. The PQ must seek additional electoral support, and to do so, it will try to tap into the 13 per cent of the right-wing electorate who supported the CAQ. In addition, the PQ has postponed its promised referendum on independence until Trump’s departure, which brings us to 2029 at the earliest. However, a minority government lasts an average of 18 to 24 months, and the PQ will want to obtain a majority mandate in the next election. It will have neither the time nor the interest, while support for sovereignty is lagging in the polls at 29%, to launch a referendum campaign in a shortened mandate.

For all these reasons, Québec solidaire must reject the misleading recommendations and adopt an incisive opposition role in Parliament as well as a combative and dynamic posture outside the National Assembly. Nine MNAs out of 127 cannot, on their own, block an austerity program. But, in alliance with the community, tenant, trade union, anti-racist, feminist and ecological movements — all the social forces that austerity is already mobilizing — a real bulwark can be erected against reactionary forces.

Québec solidaire must no longer limit itself to a role of representing the social opposition in Parliament. It must also see itself and act as a party of social mobilization.

Becoming a party of the workers and the working classes

While demonstrating great resilience in keeping six of its nine seats in Montreal as well as its representation outside Montreal, QS has nevertheless experienced a slow and gradual decline since the 2018 election, when it obtained its best result with 16.10% of the vote and ten MNAs. In 2022, the decline in the popular vote (0.60%) was minimal and relatively obscured by the number of seats won (11). But in 2026, the decline is now clear and undeniable: a loss of 3%, or more than 100,000 votes compared to the two previous elections.

A lucid and sober assessment is necessary: QS's electoralist and centralizing turn, which began in 2021, has been a failure, both at the ballot box and internally. This turn, described as “pragmatic,” has provoked multiple internal crises, all stemming from conflicts originating in the parliamentary wing. It has seriously weakened the party’s activist core and, ultimately, electoral support for the party.

However, the campaign that just ended has sparked a revival of activism and mobilization around QS, something that we have not seen for a long time. How can this progress be consolidated?

First, it is imperative that the party return to the practice of launching political campaigns outside of election periods, in order to maintain the mobilization of its members and expand its recruitment pool. The coming period will be rich in social mobilizations. This will be the ideal opportunity to bring social movement activists back into the fold of QS and to make our party a real party of the ballot box and the street.

Second, we must strengthen the identity of QS as the party of the workers and the working classes. We said it over and over during the election campaign: we are the only party that fights against austerity, wants to tax wealth and defend social and trade union rights. We must push this logic forward and affirm that we are a party of the working class and the working classes, and then support this call with sustained work in all regions of Quebec, in urban and rural areas, as well as around the major economic, social and ecological issues that affect the people: affordable housing, cost of living, improved public services, climate change, working conditions and equal rights.

To reverse its decline, our party must adopt a policy that gives it a clear identity and strong social roots.

Becoming a Left of Rupture

In 2011, Québec solidaire included in its program a call to go beyond capitalism and eventually establish the socialization of the economy. This was followed by a series of political proposals on the nationalization of strategic natural resources, national and democratic planning, workers’ self-management, the establishment of a state bank, etc. Unfortunately, these orientations were not deepened and remained more or less a dead letter until the process of revising the programme launched at the end of 2024, which unfortunately led to a weakening of the anti-capitalist proposals and the adoption of a clearly reformist programme. It is this moderate vision that has underpinned the positions of the QS leadership since 2021. The departure of [former QS co-leader] Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois at the end of 2024 has not changed anything in substance.

However, the left-wing parties that are experiencing some success in this period of the rise of the right are those that have adopted a program of rupture with the current system and that often define themselves as parties that are socialist, democratic, ecological and anti-imperialist. This is the case of Die Linke, in Germany, which has just won the mayoralty of Berlin, or Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), victorious in New York. Not to mention Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise, which openly proclaims itself to be a breakaway left. In this period of acute crises of capitalism and the rise of the right, it is the uninhibited and confident left-wing formations that are making progress, while social-democratic reformism is everywhere in crisis. It is their anti-systemic program that provides a compelling and mobilizing character to the immediate proposals of the radical left parties, while giving hope to the popular classes and the social movements that support them.

To establish itself as a real bulwark against austerity and the rise of the right, Québec solidaire will have to deepen its anti-systemic positions. The orientations of its 2011 programme must be updated in the light of recent upheavals in order to lead to a proposal for profound social transformation.

Montreal, October 12, 2026

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[1] Andrea Levy, André Frappier, « Le défi de lutter ensemble », Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme 24

 

Quebec general election results: Elected, votes, percentage of total vote
	2018	2022	2026
Parti québécois	10 687,995 votes 17.06%	3 600,000 votes 14.61%	60 1,200,364 votes 28.02%
Coalition Avenir Québec	74 1,509,455 votes 37.42%	90 1.685,573 votes 40.98%	0 572,030 votes 13.35%
Quebec Liberal Party	31 1,001,037 votes 24.82%	21 591,077 votes 14.37%	39 1,037,956 votes 24.23%
Parti conservateur du Québec	N/A*	0 530,786 votes 12.91%	19 885,337 votes 20.66%
Québec solidaire	10 649,503 votes 16.10%	11 634,535 votes 15.43%	9 532,086 votes 12.42%

* In 2018, the Green Party of Québec garnered 67,870 votes, 1.68%, but elected no one. The Conservative party did not run.

 

 

Vote for Québec solidaire to block the right and open horizons

QS co-leaders Ruba Ghazal and Sol Zanetti

Introduction

Quebec’s general election on October 5 is being contested by five parties. Four are right-wing: the pro-independence Parti québecois (PQ), expected to replace the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) in government, and the Liberals and Conservatives. The latter three are federalist or autonomist in constitutional orientation. Challenging these parties is the left-wing and pro-independence Québec solidaire, founded in 2005, which currently holds 11 seats in Quebec’s National Assembly.

This is a difficult election for QS. Quebec politics today are dominated by the rightward trend evident throughout the hemisphere and QS is far behind the capitalist parties in public opinion polls.

The on-line weekly journal Presse-toi à gauche supports Québec solidaire and the party’s left wing, now identified as “The Party of the Streets,” which aims to build support for QS in the unions and social movements. Also supporting QS in this election campaign is an open letter signed by about 100 activists and journalists, entitled “The only shield against austerité.”

In the following article, PTàG editor Bernard Rioux makes the case for voting for QS, while pointing to serious deficiencies in its electoral platform. My translation from the French.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Vote for QS to block the right and open horizons

 By Bernard Rioux

In a Quebec political landscape where the other four political parties are proposing tax cuts, partial privatizations or a disengagement of the state, Québec solidaire’s program is distinguished by an opposite orientation. This is based on the idea that contemporary social problems do not come from a state that is too present, but from a state that is insufficiently equipped and whose resources are too concentrated in the hands of the society’s wealthiest. This simple reversal of the diagnosis has a political significance that goes beyond the content of each measure taken in isolation. It keeps alive, in the public debate, the hypothesis that broader public intervention is not only possible, but desirable.

The importance for the social left of voting for Québec solidaire despite the limits of the definition of its social project

This rejection of the logic of reducing the welfare state can be seen first and foremost in taxation. The tax on large fortunes, aimed at assets of more than $25 million, reaffirms the principle of redistributing wealth at a time when the other parties are proposing instead to reduce the tax burden on the wealthiest taxpayers or corporations. While the real return on this tax will depend on the extent of tax avoidance strategies, its very existence in the electoral debate prevents the issue of wealth distribution from disappearing from the political agenda.

By proposing a 3 percent cap on rent increases, a moratorium on evictions, a fight against speculation, and the penalization of abusive landlords, as well as the acquisition of thousands of properties to offer them below the market price, among other measures, Québec solidaire is not content to mitigate the effects of a market deemed to be failing. It holds that the state can once again become a direct actor — owner, regulator, even competitor — rather than a mere arbiter. It is exactly the same logic that underlies the project of public non-profit grocery stores: by capping the margins of large chains and creating public outlets, QS proposes that the state compete directly with the private sector instead of limiting itself to regulating it from without.

In health care, the massive return to CLSCs [community health clinics], placing them in the front line, goes in the same direction: it reaffirms the principle of a universal public system at a time when the growing use of the private sector is not condemned by the CAQ, the Quebec Liberal Party, or especially by the Conservative Party of Quebec, which presents the private sector as a solution to strengthening access to the health care system. Free contraception, eye and dental care for minors, and universal school meals are part of the same philosophy: to expand, rather than contain, the scope of what the community collectively undertakes to cover.

Québec solidaire also proposes a whole series of measures aimed at fighting women’s poverty and domestic violence, and giving victims of domestic violence more means to find safety and regain their autonomy.

What distinguishes this program from a simple policy of defensive resistance, however, is that it is not limited to protecting the gains: it opens up projects that, once started, can create their own dynamics of transformation. Reform of the voting system and referendums by popular initiative are not simple administrative measures: they change the rules of the democratic game themselves, which can facilitate the adoption of more ambitious reforms than those included in the current program. Similarly, the Constituent Assembly co-constructed with the First Peoples places the independence project within a participatory approach that  goes beyond the traditional electoral framework and leaves the door open to a broader refoundation of the social contract.

Mission-based funding for community organizations, the climate emergency fund, the gradual phase-out of oil and gas infrastructure, and the massive development of free public transit for young people and seniors all work together to chart a coherent trajectory: each measure, taken alone, corrects a specific inequity, but as a whole this installs an institutional infrastructure — fiscal, democratic and energy — on which more important transformations could then be supported. It is in this sense that Québec solidaire’s program can be read as a brake on the neoliberal trend in Quebec politics.

Faced with the right-wing policies defended by the other major political parties, a vote for Québec solidaire is therefore a vote in defence of the interests of the popular majority. This is all the more important for activists from the various social movements — trade-union, feminist, popular, student, etc. A joint declaration by activists from these different social movements could be an important contribution to the defence of the gains of the popular majority.

The limits of defensive demands incapable of presenting an alternative social project to capitalism

Québec solidaire’s program shifts from the dominant right-wing discourse of the other parties. It reaffirms the legitimacy of public intervention, fiscal redistribution and market regulation. But this shift, as real as it is, takes place almost entirely within the existing framework of capitalist property and economic power relations. The problem is constantly posed in terms of insufficient or unfair results produced by the market, but rarely in terms of who controls the means of production and who therefore holds the decision-making power.

This absence has concrete effects on the nature of the solutions proposed. Let’s take the most telling example: the $2 billion “Trump provision” intended to support companies affected by the tariff war. It is a transfer of public funds to the private sector to help it maintain jobs and transform production, without any quid pro quo in terms of ownership, governance or workers' control over these companies. The state thus finances the survival and restructuring of capital rather than considering, for example, the nationalization of strategic companies or the establishment of workers’ cooperatives as alternatives.

The 2035 Transition Plan constitutes, in relation to the prevailing climate inaction and the refusal of the other parties to make a clear break with the exploitation of hydrocarbons, a set of important redistributive and regulatory measures. But, if we analyse these proposals from the systemic bases of the crisis, they fall short of the necessities posed by the climate emergency and the loss of biodiversity.

The crisis is described more as a problem of governance and poor choices than as the result of a capitalist economic system hung up on growth incapable of respecting planetary boundaries. Thus the 2035 Transition Plan states: “In reality, the climate crisis is the result of poor economic choices as well as ineffective and poorly targeted policies.” The proposed climate targets fall short of the scientific urgency highlighted by the IPCC. The nationalization of renewable energies is not presented as a priority. The industrial policy relies on partnership with employers rather than on public and democratic planning. Public transit remains partially commodified, since free travel is restricted to young people and seniors. The construction of public transit infrastructure is left to the private sector. The protection of the territory is mainly based on a regulatory framework, while the exploitation of mining and forestry resources remains largely in the hands of large Canadian and American multinational companies. The plan aims to strengthen food autonomy without calling into question agro-export agriculture, a large part of which is focused on animal production.

As for the independence project, the text presents it mainly through the prism of a constituent and participatory approach, co-constructed with the First Peoples—which distinguishes it from the Parti Québécois in terms of method. But there is no sufficiently developed link between independence and a critique of Quebec’s structural dependence on foreign capital, continental value chains or international financial institutions.

Independence is therefore thought of mainly as an institutional reform and as national recognition, rather than as a break with relations of economic domination that go beyond the Canadian framework alone. For an anti-imperialist reading of sovereignty, this leaves intact the question of who would really own an independent Quebec and what its relationship would be to militarist alliances like NATO and NORAD. These questions are all the more important when confronted with the PQ project, defined in its Blue Book as a project of independence which, in this analysis, remains marked by a neocolonial orientation.

Finally, in the field of labour itself, the program remains largely within the parameters of the existing wage system: an increase in the minimum wage, an improvement in conditions in the community sector, and the hiring of staff in the public services. These are real gains for workers, but there are no measures to affect economic democracy in the strongest sense: no mention of increased representation of workers on boards of directors, union vetoes over closures and relocations, expansion of the cooperative or self-managed sector, or a plan of nationalizations democratically controlled by those who work there.

It can therefore be argued that Québec solidaire acts as a brake on the neoliberal trend by reaffirming the role of the redistributive state. This is why the mobilization to broaden its electorate is an important issue for the left. But this strategic choice should not prevent us from understanding that QS’s proposals do not, on their own, provide a strategic compass for the radical transformation needed to shift economic decision-making power out of the hands of capital.

Such a transformation is essential to confront the economic, social and ecological crises faced by the people of Quebec, like the rest of humanity.

Voting for QS can thus help block social retreat and the slippage to the right, while leaving open the need to build, beyond its current program, a real ecosocialist alternative to capitalism.

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Avi Lewis’ Yom Kippur reflection speaks to Jews fighting for a better world

In view of the slanderous attacks on NDP federal leader Avi Lewis for his statement grieving Israel's genocidal war on the Palestinians, I reproduce the statement issued by Independent Jewish Voices, an anti-Zionist organization of Canadian Jews. Bear in mind that Israel wrongfully claims to represent Jews world-wide, -- Richard Fidler

In advance of Yom Kippur, NDP leader Avi Lewis tweeted a brief reflection, naming that on a day when Jews are called to account for the year that has passed, “we failed to do our part to stop an ongoing genocide committed in our name.” 

Thousands of Jews around the world marked the holy day with the same solemn reflection, grappling with the same grief, from mass public yizkor demonstrations to private contemplation at communal gatherings. Lewis is far from alone in the frustration that our collective efforts have fallen short in the face of the unrelenting devastation being inflicted upon Palestinians by Israel. 

Yet rather than grapple with the reality of Israel’s ongoing genocide, several politicians, commentators, and pro-Israel lobby groups have fixated on Lewis’ statement, mischaracterizing this heartfelt expression of grief as antisemitic. They even went so far as to blame Lewis for the frightening shooting outside a synagogue in Belleville, Ontario, at the outset of Kol Nidre, Yom Kippur evening services. 

As we have since learned, the shooter, a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces, is purported to have subscribed to antisemitic conspiracy theories, including that Jews were responsible for COVID-19. He has since died of injuries sustained in a shootout with a police officer, who is now in critical condition. While fortunately none of the congregants were injured, the instance is a grim reminder of ongoing threats posed to Jews by far-right antisemitic conspiracy theorists, a phenomenon that goes all too often ignored as Zionist lobby groups and pundits find it more politically advantageous to focus their ire on supporters of Palestinian liberation. 

Not even Jews like Avi Lewis are spared in their haste to jump to conclusions and score points for Israel and its defenders when we speak simple truths: that a genocide is being committed, that it is being done in our name, and that we must do everything in our ability to bring about justice in the face of such atrocities. We do not hold all Jews accountable for the actions of Israel, as bad-faith critics often claim when we speak as a collective. Rather, we follow Jewish intellectual traditions of collectivity. 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously wrote, “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” The ashamnu prayer that we say at Yom Kippur reflects a sense of collective responsibility, saying “we are guilty” or “we have trespassed.” Our traditions teach us to understand ourselves as morally intertwined with one another, each individual acting not only on behalf of themself alone, but as part of a larger whole. This tradition is a fundamental principle for progressive Jews who fight for collective liberation. 

As Jews, we feel particularly called upon to respond to the atrocities being committed in our name. But every day we see Canadians of many backgrounds and faiths feel similarly called to respond to those same war crimes being committed with their own government’s tacit endorsement or subsidized with their tax dollars. In this regard, it is not Canadian Jews that are uniquely responsible, who have failed to stop a genocide. It is everyone, together. It is notably the Canadian government and other signatories of the Genocide Convention, for whom it is not only required to punish acts of genocide but also to prevent them. 

Zionist politicians, lobbyists and pundits are evidently more interested in smearing a progressive Jewish politician than helping Canada fulfill its international obligations. And in their eagerness to misattribute blame for antisemitism to Palestine solidarity, they fail to address the very real threat of white supremacy and far-right extremism to Jewish life. Most egregiously, they dismiss and distract from Israel’s ongoing attempted annihilation of the Palestinian people in full view of the world, every day.

 

 

 

 

A left-wing Pan-Americanism?

Critical notes on a declaration signed by the Broadbent Institute and some NDP MPs

Introduction

The Ottawa-based Broadbent Institute, which functions increasingly as a think-tank for the federal NDP leadership, was a major participant in the third Panamerican Congress. The Congress met in Montevideo, Uruguay in mid August. It was attended by representatives of left-wing parties from throughout the Western Hemisphere. A press release issued August 25 by the Canadian delegation states:

 The Panamerican Congress is the only permanent parliamentary forum where democratic and progressive forces from across the hemisphere come together to develop common positions on the shared challenges facing their people. The Canadian delegation to the 2026 Congress included Broadbent Institute Executive Director Jen Hassum, Director of Policy and Engagement Clement Nocos, MP Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway), MP Leah Gazan (Winnipeg Centre), Chief of Staff to the Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada Savhanna Wilson, and NDP Principal Secretary Peyton Veitch. [Emphasis in original]

The Congress concluded with the adoption of the Montevideo Declaration, which calls for more equal dialogue between the Global North and Global South and the construction of broad coalitions and alternative mechanisms through which to defend a crumbling international order. The event took place at a bad moment for the regional left: in the year that passed since the last such conference, the Left has lost power in Bolivia, Honduras, Chile, and Colombia, while Venezuela – its President Maduro kidnapped by the United States – is now under US tutelage. Cuba, for decades the inspiration of the hemisphere’s progressive forces, faces economic collapse and imminent threat of US invasion.

In view of the prominence assigned to this event by the Broadbent Institute and some federal NDP leaders, I think North American socialists would benefit from consulting a critique of the Congress and its Declaration by a major left-wing Latin American website, the Red América Latina, published on August 27. The following is a translation of this critical text, which I believe was authored by Lautaro Rivara, an Argentine revolutionary socialist. The footnotes are mine. – Richard Fidler

 

A left-wing Pan-Americanism?

27/08/2026

Some critical notes on the Montevideo Declaration and the third Pan-American Congress that took place in Montevideo between August 21 and 23.

From August 21 to 23, the third Pan-American Congress was held in Montevideo, Uruguay, which brought together more than 150 officials, legislators and former presidents from 15 countries in the region. Among them only two Caribbean countries, with the notable absence of Cuba – as well as that of Venezuela and Nicaragua – but with the presence of parliamentary representatives from the United States and Canada.

Under the slogan “solidarity among peoples, sovereignty among nations” the participants shared numerous activities in the Legislative Palace of Montevideo and in the Mercosur Building. However, the large participation seems to contrast with the reduced political and social impact it had in the region, significantly less than that of its two previous editions, held respectively in Bogotá (2024) and Mexico City (2025).

We would like to share here some critical comments on the document resulting from the Congress, the so-called “Montevideo Declaration.” What follows are not the isolated shots of a lone sniper, but the appreciations of a militant convinced of the necessary unity of the left and organically committed to the ideology and integrationist project of Our America. I hope that these ideas will serve to stimulate a respectful and fraternal debate.

To begin with, it is necessary to clarify that the unionist doctrine of the independence leader Simón Bolívar, cited in the document, is called Bolivarianism or “Amphyctyonic”, due to the inspiration found in the ideology and organization of the old Hellenic amphictyonic leagues, known through figures such as Emeric Crucé, the Duke of Sully, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and above all mediated in its Latin American reception by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Our first intellectuals and integrationist leaders – such as Francisco de Miranda, José Cecilio del Valle or Bolívar himself – knew, adapted, realized and greatly enriched this tradition.[1]

“Pan-Americanism,” on the other hand, is a totally antagonistic and subsequent conception promoted by the hegemonism of the United States since the end of the nineteenth century, starting with figures such as former Secretary of State James Blaine, promoter of the First International Conference of American States in Washington D.C., in 1889. The idea of a subordinate customs union that we saw emerge strongly in the Free Trade Area of the Americas project has its distant roots in this original project. But it would be the early Cold War and the founding of the OAS [Organization of American States] in 1948 that would give political and institutional flesh to the so-called “inter-American system” under the tutelage of the great North American hegemon.

This is what any politician, intellectual, or citizen of Latin America and the Caribbean commonly understands by “Pan-Americanism.” For this reason, it is a serious mistake to refer to the historical integrationist project – Bolivarian, amphictyonic, Our American – in this way, even if it contemplates – as in fact it always did – the practice of international solidarity with the American people, its subordinate subjects, and its anti-imperialist organizations. From the time of the Civil War to the emergence of the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and Black Power in the 1950s and 1960s, there have always been close networks of collaboration and exchange in the political, cultural, and even military fields between the United States and Our America.

On the other hand, the “doctrine of domination” or “unilateral supremacy” that the document mentions several times so timidly and elusively is called “imperialism” and “neocolonialism.” That is what our independence patriots called it; this is how our most brilliant intellectuals studied it. From Simón Bolívar’s early warnings about the United States “destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom” to “the turbulent and brutal north” of which José Martí warned us, passing through the long and dizzying twentieth century until reaching our days, we have generated a very rich anti-colonial and anti-imperialist heritage and legacy; Why deny it, silence it or throw it overboard now?

As in any document, what is omitted is as important or more important than what is declared. Thus, the text refers, in the abstract and in the plural, to the problem of the “kidnappings of Heads of State.” We doubt that they refer to Manuel Noriega in 1989 or to the “extraction” of other extracontinental leaders, so we have to deduce that the document refers to nothing less than the kidnapping of the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, in the early hours of January 3. The curious thing is why Maduro is, in the several pages of the statement, the only person who is not mentioned by name.[2]

It may seem like a detail, but this indirect and almost spectral allusion is not accidental, if we consider that many of the signatories of the declaration omitted and fail to make further statements about the extralegal and extraterritorial capture of the Venezuelan president. If as progressives or leftists we have to juggle so much to condemn the bombing of a sovereign country and the kidnapping of its Head of State, we are in the presence of a serious problem; we are faced with the manifest inability to draw “red lines” and to establish the lowest common denominators around our sovereignty and our national and regional self-determination, regardless of the economic or institutional model that the sector or process may promote.

One of the mentions that most caught our attention has to do with so-called “lawfare.” But contrary to what the declaration suggests, legal warfare mechanisms are not used either primarily or exclusively against “elected officials.” This is, in fact, a presumption and a typical error of those same “elected officials,” who fail to see the extent and depth of the phenomenon of lawfare, and its inscription in the more general modalities of hybrid war, neo-interventionism and new counterinsurgency doctrines.

Lawfare, as an instrument of criminalization, persecution, imprisonment and demoralization of political, social and geopolitical dissidence, also affects – and in general with little or no possibility of defense – trade unionists, social leaders, environmental, indigenous and Afro-descendant referents, as well as human rights defenders, journalists, students or intellectuals.

One of the most worrisome drifts of the document refers to the explicit replacement of peoples, nations and organizations by the “legislators who represent them,” which is symptomatic of the course followed by a good part of the Latin American, Caribbean and “hemispheric” meetings of recent years. From diverse, multitudinous and controversial conclaves – such as the São Paulo Forums in the 90s or the meetings of social movements in this century – to increasingly bureaucratized and restricted spaces for the socialization of progressive elites; expensive meetings without previous objectives, resulting goals, clear responsible, or subsequent follow-up, whose biggest footprint seems to be the carbon footprint of the guests’ planes.

This tacit conception, at the antipodes of the protagonist democracy that animated the progressive, integrationist and leftist cycle of recent decades, emulates – or rather imitates – the historical liberal positions, which consider that “the people do not deliberate or govern except through their representatives,” as summarized in the famous Article 22 of the Constitution of the Argentine Republic, the legatee of the original Magna Carta of 1853.

In line with the above, it is a gross mistake to consider that “democratic rights and freedoms” are those that have inspired and animated our last “centuries of struggle.” This liberal revisionism ignores the fact that nationalism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism and social liberation have been the communicating vessels that connect the different cycles of continental struggle in the history of Our America.

We find similar errors if we move from the spectrum of political-institutional problems to that of economic-social ones. Thus, the declaration states that what is at stake is to seek a “sovereign and shared prosperity,” which seems to replace the anti-neoliberal critique and the post-neoliberal attempts – more or less radical, more or less successful – that defined the meaning and delimited the very subject of the progressive and leftist cycle. In fact, sovereignty and prosperity are completely antagonistic to a neoliberalism that in our region was unequal, exclusive, authoritarian and colonial from its very origins, “dripping blood and mud through every general strike” up to the coup d’état against the Popular Unity government in Chile, on September 11, 1973.

Within this rhetoric, which owes much to the Cepal technocracy[3] and to a kind of ambiguous and decaffeinated multipolarism – and which seems to have wiped the slate clean of Latin American and Caribbean theories of dependency – “productive integration” replaces economic integration and political unity in the region.

On the other hand, it is symptomatic that having met in the Pan-American Congress and having published this declaration in the very month of Fidel Castro’s centenary, his name has been cavalierly ignored. We could not blame it on a mere oversight, considering that there have been dozens – if not hundreds – of events throughout the region that have celebrated and valued the political and intellectual legacy of the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution.

We believe that this is not a fortuitous event, given that Castro was a bitter opponent of Pan-Americanism, even of its liberal and “progressive” variants, which he grimly had to confront, both in the times of the Alliance for Progress and amidst the sweeping triumph of the single-minded neoliberal thought that seduced so many former comrades who went over with bag and baggage in tow to the enemy camp.

In a nutshell, the Montevideo Declaration says little, errs a lot and concedes too much. But ideological and political retrenchment may not be the best strategy to confront the reactionary and imperial wave that is laying waste to Our America. But the program can only be explained by the subject. The fact that officials replace the people, the liberal-progressives the left, and Pan-Americanism our Americanism, is a result of conclaves that have become increasingly distant, selective, and palatial.

The simple fact that former Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who liquidated the social outburst and the constituent process and handed over his country to neo-Pinochetism on a silver platter, was an honoured guest at the meeting, speaks volumes about it. Instead of being accountable to his fellow citizens for the devastating consequences of his extreme-centrism, he is now allowed to lecture on radicalism in international conclaves, while he is shaping up for an unlikely new candidacy for La Moneda or – with much greater probability – to occupy some space as prestigious as it is harmless in the United Nations system.

To be fair, the criticisms that can be made of the Montevideo Declaration and the Third Pan-American Congress are common to many other spaces that we inhabit, and that have also been sclerosed or condemned to insignificance over the years. Revitalizing the project of Latin American and Caribbean union involves both recovering our historical emancipatory traditions – and not buying ideological trinkets from any liberal huckster – and reposing to ourselves concrete questions, but above all imposing precise militant tasks on us.

What does the Congress propose – and what do we propose – to prevent the imminent invasion of Cuba, to stop the genocide in Gaza, to confront the reactionary wave and its annihilatory fantasies or to put a stop to the greed of imperialism and the big digital corporations? The answer, no matter how necessary an international event may be, will not be found among the cold stones of a palace, but in the embers, still burning, of social and popular resistance, and in the atavistic memory of our internationalist practice.

 

---

[1] The text recalls the legacy of the Amphictyonic Congress of 1826, held in Panama, which laid the foundation of the first dream of regional integration.

[2] Also ignored, as the text states later, was the name of Fidel Castro.

[3] CEPAL/ECLAC: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, a United Nations regional commission established in 1948 to establish economic cooperation.

Out of the impasse? The Avi Lewis campaign and left strategy

Introduction

The federal New Democratic Party will elect a new leader at the end of March. Five candidates are contesting the leadership, the principal ones being Heather McPherson, a sitting MP who offers essentially a continuation of the political orientation and policies the party has upheld in recent years, and Avi Lewis, who is offering a radical alternative that challenges many conventional party practices and policies.

The following article by two Toronto-based members of the party describes very well the opportunity open to the radical left to use the Lewis candidacy to engage with the NDP, and the challenges facing that left should Lewis become the party leader. It is republished, with permission, from The Midnight Sun.

-- Richard Fidler

* * *

Out of the impasse? The Avi Lewis campaign and left strategy

By Marcel Nelson and Nathan Rao

With the near collapse of Canada’s federal New Democratic Party (NDP) in the 2025 federal election, the Canadian electoral terrain is today dominated by a tug of war between two forces: a centre-right technocratic and authoritarian pole around Mark Carney’s Liberals, and a MAGA-adjacent hard right around Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. This sometimes substantive, sometimes theatrical clash opens up space for far-right forces who draw inspiration from the advance of racist and fascist elements in the United States and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the American president continues to threaten to subjugate and even annex Canada – threats we shouldn’t understate. 

This is also a time of opportunity. To see that potential, one need only look to the global movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and to Zohran Mamdani’s successful mayoral campaign in New York City, a political breakthrough for the left. It’s in this context that, in the Canadian state, journalist and activist Avi Lewis’s campaign for the leadership of the NDP has attracted much attention, dedication, and debate. 

Lewis has won the support of many left organizers in part because he’s taken bold and promising policy positions on important questions. For example, he has argued for steps towards public ownership and democratic control in vital areas of the economy such as housing, food, telecoms, and banking. He has also laid out an ambitious vision for transforming our economy through a green transition that includes employment guarantees for workers exiting the destructive oil and gas industry. He has made the fight for Indigenous rights a central theme of his campaign – as well as the struggle for a free Palestine – and has been vocal about confronting the far right wherever it rears its head.

Yet the deeper value of Lewis’s campaign, beyond its policy statements, is its drive to transform the NDP and the way we conduct left-wing politics in this country. Lewis has been clear that his campaign’s core project is to build a powerful united movement to defeat the threats we face: to organize solidarity with grassroots protests and strikes, as well as to unite and mobilize support for left candidates at election time. His campaign has also been helpful insofar as it has provided an opportunity for serious debate about left strategy and organization – discussions that have not taken place in Canada on anything approaching a mass, country-wide scale in a very long time.  

 

Policy and strategy

Small, independent organizations of the activist left in Canada have served as an important training ground for activists and thinkers. Some of today’s trade union and social movement leaders have emerged from those spaces. So have a range of campaigners, commentators, and intellectuals. 

Yet the independent organizations in Canada to the left of the NDP have been at a strategic impasse for many years. This impasse stems, in part, from a rigid organizational culture and outlook within many of these groups, which may tend to overestimate the political possibilities of a given historical period. These groups are also sometimes unable to root themselves in actually existing struggles without losing their core commitment to developing revolutionary thinking and strategy. Some of these groups race to recruit new members, while others slip into a kind of political quietism, cultivating a self-image as guardians of left orthodoxy while waiting for a popular mass upsurge that never comes – or that appears for a moment, only to bypass these organizations completely before eventually dissipating.

There is an important place for Marxists and revolutionary socialists in the current political landscape in Canada, to be sure. But functioning as a loose network of like-minded activists is an inadequate response to the dangers and opportunities of the present moment. The Lewis campaign seems to us to be an opening in which we might break, or at least shake up, this impasse: a moment when the country’s small revolutionary left may connect with far bigger and broader forces. 

The NDP has never been a neutral strategic terrain. If Avi Lewis wins the NDP leadership, he will find himself at the helm of a party reshaped by major internal reforms made during the era of previous leader Jack Layton, which aimed to “professionalize” the party and weaken its links to organized labour. The result has been greater powers concentrated in the hands of the party leader and their immediate circle, further marginalizing the role of riding associations, active members, labour organizers, and other layers. This has exacerbated the party’s tendency to focus on parliamentary manoeuvering at the expense of other political priorities such as building and maintaining its grassroots base.

The NDP’s mix of full-time staffers and consultants have decades of experience with manipulating party procedures to exclude radical resolutions at conventions, and to prevent individuals with political positions they find undesirable from obtaining nominations at election time. The Ontario NDP drove out former Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama for her Palestine solidarity, while the British Columbia NDP disqualified climate justice activist Anjali Appadurai’s leadership candidacy. The NDP’s history is littered with the cadavers of initiatives that sought to orient the party towards a more left-wing path, from the Waffle of the 1970s to the New Politics Initiative of the early 2000s, to the Leap Manifesto of the 2010s. 

Clearly the NDP is not an instrument that can be wielded with ease by Lewis or any left-wing project. Yet there is nothing metaphysical about the party’s tendency to disappoint or its success in crushing left-wing insurgencies within its ranks. Like any political party, the NDP is an institution riven by power struggles and beset by contradictions – a strategic terrain where opposing interests struggle for dominance, whether those interests find expression in provincial sections of the party, particular riding associations, or elements of the federal party bureaucracy. Some opponents of Lewis’s project might prefer to break up the party, and even join the Liberals, rather than cede ground. It is thus up to Lewis and allied forces to develop a strategy and a coalition capable of taking advantage of those contradictions. 

Contrary to the received wisdom one often encounters on the left, the marginalization of the left in the NDP is not entirely due to the party’s bureaucratic machinations. While those dynamics were, for example, certainly involved in delivering a severe blow to the socialist Waffle project at the federal party’s 1971 convention, the Waffle’s initiatives were defeated on the convention floor by votes cast by rank-and-file members. Backers of left-wing initiatives within the NDP cannot be satisfied with denouncing the party’s undemocratic practices, as these will inevitably arise. We must be able to anticipate and counter them.  

April’s devastating federal election result for the NDP dealt a severe blow to the consultants, pollsters, and strategists who have held the party’s reins for more than two decades. Not only did the near-complete collapse of the NDP’s vote undermine the legitimacy of the internal methods in place since Jack Layton was leader, but the resulting loss of official party status meant the leader’s office and the party’s research bureau also lost their funding. This situation has been compounded by the fact that the party is heavily indebted. Destabilized and in crisis, the federal NDP may today be more open to a socialist and democratic reorientation than it has been at any point in the last few decades, even if conservative forces within the party will certainly put up a fight.

Towards a strategy of engagement with the NDP 

In public forums and private conversations with organizers, Lewis has acknowledged all these realities. He appears to be alert to how his political project faces serious countervailing forces both within the NDP and beyond it, which will entice the project towards compromise and betrayal of the social movements with which it claims to stand. Accordingly, Lewis has mused about turning the NDP’s riding associations into activist hubs, with the aim of building the kind of popular mass networks that can both support his project and pressure it to stick to its declared agenda. He has speculated, alternatively, that building independent or quasi-independent organizations that operate both within and outside the NDP, like the Democratic Socialists of America in the US or Momentum in the UK, may be needed to create such networks and pressure. Lewis is well-versed in socialist political culture and likely keenly aware of the failures of past socialist initiatives in Canada and abroad: the lessons of the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns, as well as the experience of the left-wing Syriza government in Greece or the so-called Pink Tide left governments in Latin America.

At the same time, although the Lewis campaign has spoken frequently about the desirability of building these hubs and independent organizations, laying the groundwork for them has not been a campaign priority so far. Not unreasonably, the campaign has focused on signing up new members and rallying current ones – focused, that is, on winning the NDP leadership contest. While loose local campaign chapters have sprung up across the country, they don’t appear to have been centrally involved in shaping campaign strategy. The campaign recently published a high-level position on party renewal that expresses an intention to transform riding associations into activist hubs, but it remains to be seen whether Lewis will prioritize such an initiative if elected leader.

Time will tell whether this has been the most appropriate organizing model for winning the leadership race. It’s hard to say whether a more participatory approach would have gained traction, given the sporadic and uneven state of left politics in the country today. It’s also difficult to predict the Lewis campaign team’s plans for navigating the choppy waters that lie ahead, whatever the outcome of the leadership race, and how the call to build activist hubs across the country will be received if Lewis wins. At a public meeting we recently helped host, about building a relationship between the activist left and a potential Lewis-led NDP, the conversation’s tenor was generally positive, suggesting Lewis and his campaign may have opened the door to a more constructive relationship between the grassroots left in Canada and the NDP. Still, we came away from that meeting with a renewed sense of the enormous work, imagination, and goodwill needed to build the mechanisms that would allow those left forces to both support and hold to account a Lewis NDP. 

At the same time, it can be simplistic to assume there exists a neat dichotomy between more radical social movements and more moderate entities such as political parties. This dichotomy is well-worn: past initiatives to move the NDP to the left, such as the 2001 New Politics Initiative, assumed the renewal of the NDP necessitated bringing the party to the country’s social movements – a fetishization of social movements as a reservoir of radical politics and grassroots democracy that remains strong today. In reality, “social movements” in Canada are largely composed of trade unions, student unions, environmental and other issue-based campaigns, NGOs, and other organizations that are aligned with NDP priorities and operating within the same institutional networks, with personnel whose individual career trajectories often span multiple corners of that ecosystem. This can sometimes even place these movements and their leaderships politically to the right of the NDP, especially when it is not in government. We should acknowledge that social movements, especially where organized labour is involved in them, are beset by internal contradictions, including debates over their strategic and ideological orientations.

The NDP and social movements should be seen as intersecting terrains on which different strategies compete, each presenting both challenges and opportunities. Defeating the centrist forces that operate there won’t be accomplished by staying on the sidelines. The goal should instead be to coordinate an alternative left political project within and across both arenas – a coordination that would necessarily involve those who hold elected office as representatives of the NDP.  

 

Some provisional principles for engagement with the NDP 

Left debate is full of binaries such as electoral politics versus social movements and labour bureaucracy versus rank and file, where one of the coordinates is assumed to be more radical or more authentically socialist than the other. Yet these debates too often remain abstract. The radical potential of any political force needs to be tested in the realm of real politics and struggle, not labelled in a way that decides its nature and potential in advance. 

Two guiding principles could help. The first is to avoid investing any one individual or organization with the responsibility of being the standard-bearer for a left political project of transformation. No one individual or organization – not even a federal political party – would independently have the leverage to sustain such a project in the face of reactionary headwinds. Nor would any single individual or organization alone be able to resolve the profound contradictions that beset Canada as a multinational settler-colonial state. There must always be room for autonomous Indigenous and Québécois initiatives that may advocate for distinct projects of self-determination.

A second guiding principle is that we shouldn’t be afraid of, and should even seek to encourage, generative tensions in our political projects. Such tensions include the need to hold left-wing office-holders to account and also buttress them with support when needed. That dynamic could help those office-holders resist the opposing forces that will inevitably seek to neutralize any left political project. More broadly, it would allow for the development of a left ecology in which the NDP, social movements, and labour work out our contradictions in the course of real struggle, with the goal of building the left’s power.

Struggling to reshape the NDP would require taking over existing institutional mechanisms or creating new ones – transforming riding associations into activist hubs, for example. It could entail building or growing grassroots organizations that intervene within the NDP while remaining autonomous from it. We are agnostic about whether a Lewis-led NDP would be the main driving force in this network of intersecting initiatives, each with its own structure and activities. 

Ultimately, the left in Canada must ask itself whether it can afford to wait for a better opportunity to come along to meet our moment’s escalating crises. Is there capacity and will in this country to build a left-wing alternative to the NDP that can operate on the scale needed to meet those challenges in a timely manner? And can the left afford to leave the electoral field to the pollsters and strategists that have dominated the NDP for the last few decades – or worse, to the eternal, suffocating showdown between the center-right Liberals and the hard-right Conservatives? 

In the short to medium term, it seems as though there is no popular basis in Canada for a mass left-wing, country-wide force entirely outside the NDP. The longstanding impasse and small-group character of organizations to the left of the NDP in this country illustrates this clearly. Engaging with the NDP through the Avi Lewis leadership campaign, in part to seed activist hubs and other fresh organizations, could be read as an attempt at a shortcut – a gamble that imperfect means can help us leap beyond the left’s impasse. But we believe the gamble is worthwhile, because of how much all our struggles, movements, and organizations stand to benefit from such a leap.

Marcel Nelson teaches politics in the Ontario college sector.

Nathan Rao is a Toronto-based interpreter and translator.